


Only winning, winning now

by Luthor



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alternate Universe - K/DA, F/F, K/DA, i don't go here im just gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 14:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16557602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthor/pseuds/Luthor
Summary: Ahri runs into a ghost from her past at a promo event, and hides.Trouble is, Evelynn's alwaysjust therein the shadows.





	Only winning, winning now

**Author's Note:**

> A little precursor to this fic: I'm pretty sure I've played this game exactly once and it was not my jam, but that music video set me on fire. 
> 
> I've done very little research into League lore and I'm in way over my head, so sorry for any inconsistencies outside of the actual AU. 
> 
> Huge thanks to [tieflings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tieflings/pseuds/tieflings) for introducing me to this and murdering me in the process, ily.

Ahri returns to herself in the cold.

 

The street she’s on is well lit in strobe-light yellows, and sporadically littered with people sharing cigarettes and quiet conversation. The bassline from a popular remix of a chart song pounds against the door that had closed behind her, tethering her back to the club, and the heady mix of arousal and intoxication filling the atmosphere indoors like pink mist— like dry ice.

Ahri turns her back to it, paces further away from the club’s back exit, and wrings her hands together.

 

Belatedly, she realises that she’s lost her drink indoors.

 

The strawberry daiquiri had turned quickly sour on her lips, though, spoiled by an unwanted ghost from her past, and Ahri does not miss it. A drink, though— for the nerves, or just the cold, she is not quick to find an excuse. She feels the itch of the urge like a vibration in her teeth, and in her unsettled state it is difficult to remember the power of her own restraint.

 

If she were halfway drunk enough, Ahri might just take herself back inside and drown down the confusing mix of her feelings – loathing, frustration,  _ embarrassment _ – at the bar. As it is, the spike of cold air sharpens her mind and other senses, and Ahri lets herself recognise both the longing inside of her, and the loneliness that keeps her from acting on it.

 

A gaggle of taxi cabs travel too quickly past the club, stirring up a bitter wind. Ahri turns to shield her eyes from both the glare of their headlights, and the city dust roused into the air, and that’s when she feels it. There’s something  _ warm _ and cloying in against the shaded patch of wall to her left shoulder, unreached by the neon lights, something  _ dark _ .

 

Ahri’s skin prickles with the lure to walk toward it, and that’s when she recognises her, and sighs.

 

Evelynn materialises from the darkness in a pair of round glasses that reflect the city lights behind Ahri.

 

“You’re lurking,” Ahri says, accusatory, but there’s little bite to her words.

 

Evelynn slinks forward with something of a delicate shrug. She is feline and barely corporeal, until she rounds the corner into direct, artificial light, and leans against the building with a foot against the wall behind her. She regards Ahri from behind her sunglasses, but there’s something soft and familiar in the shape of her lips. Not quite a smile, but fondness nonetheless.

 

“I was just thinking,” Evelynn says, flexing her foot against the wall. She tips her head down to watch the movement as she bends her foot back and forth, like a slow, barely-audible  _ tap-tap _ of heel against the concrete. She always moves to a kind of rhythm that eludes the rest of them. “Strange, isn’t it, that they’re holding an entire event in our name just through that door, and yet—” Evelynn does not tilt her head up, but flicks her gaze above the rim of her glasses, eyes sharp, “ _ you’re _ out here, hiding from it all.”

 

Ahri raises her brows, but she has little in way of an excuse, so she does not try for one.

 

“That’s right,” she even agrees, hugging her arms around her to stave off what she can of the chill air. “You found me.”

 

The wry inflection in her voice, meant to diffuse and appease, and draw the attention away from the topic at hand, backfires. Her voice wobbles. That soft, gentle thing in Evelynn’s mouth falls – blunt and immediate, like a guillotine. She straightens, presses her body with her back straight up against the club wall, and then pushes herself off from it.

 

With this particular set of heels on, she’s an inch taller than Ahri, if that.

 

“Of course, I found you,” she says, nearing. The wind draws Ahri’s hair over her face, but Evelynn reaches up and tucks it back behind her ear, out of the way. “You were never hiding from me.”

 

Ahri sees her own face reflected back at her in Evelynn’s glasses – pale, oddly expressionless.

 

“No,” she says, “I could never hide from you in the shadows.”

 

The draw of a smile turns at one corner of Evelynn’s painted lips. “Tell me what happened,” she says, and there is no refusing her.

 

Evelynn is like that – demanding, forthright. She’s everything that Ahri needed more of, when she first began her music career, too young and too naïve and entirely unprepared for what she was getting herself into. She sighs at the thought, closes her eyes briefly, but the dark space behind them is infiltrated by her companion. Even here, Ahri cannot escape her.

 

She exhales and opens her eyes.

 

“Did you know Dy Suh was invited tonight?”

 

Evelynn’s lips pinch.  _ Suh _ . The name is familiar.

 

“As in,  _ Suh Records _ ?”

 

Ahri nods her head. “As in,” she says, “my first record label.”

 

A muscle in Evelynn’s jaw flexes. “Your manager,” she surmises, and Ahri nods again.

 

She takes a breath and looks out across the street. Just steps ahead of them, an unfamiliar pair stubs out the cigarette they were sharing and flicks it out toward the road. Ahri watches them drape arms around each other in their shuffle back to the entrance, welcoming of the distraction. She can feel Evelynn against her peripheral, sharp and bright, waiting for her to speak.

 

“He just took me by surprise. I haven’t seen him in probably six years. I can’t remember the last time I even  _ thought _ about him, even.”

 

It is dismissive and untruthful. She had been sixteen years old, and blowing up, and in her element, or so she had thought. She hadn’t realised that the music industry could be a tank full of hungry piranhas until she felt the pinch of that first bite, and then it had been a feeding frenzy – against her volition, her image, her self-esteem.

 

In the thick of it, she had been too afraid to leave her home without four separate people approving what she was wearing, what she was saying, what she was going to do—

 

Ahri had come out bent and bruised, and her recovery has been reduced to a tagline across magazine covers.

 

The triumph in her return to music has been crumpled like a sheet of paper in the hand of the public eye, as though  _ all _ it had been was a brand new wardrobe.

 

The truth of it is, she was one of the luckier girls who got out before she could become a statistic.

 

She had fought her way out of her contract as though it were barbed wire, and cuts like that have a way of sinking right to the bone and staying there, even long after they have healed. That stifling period of her life is like a scar on the inside of her mouth, still. Sometimes, a sore. Leave it well alone, and the red-raw of it would just recover. Tongue at it too often, however, and the sore opens up, worsens, begets more attention, and  _ attention _ begets attention.

 

It is too easy to spiral.

 

“Ahri,” Evelynn says, and it’s a quiet demand that she return to the present, to the street where they’re standing, in the wind that chills against her bare legs. Ahri shivers once, violently, and Evelynn sighs. She presses forward, taking Ahri’s hand in one of hers, and winding the other around her back.

 

She pulls Ahri in close, where Evelynn is warm and soft and sweet with perfume.

 

“Do me one small favour,” she says, her voice in Ahri’s ear. “Look up there.”

 

She releases the hand that she’s holding to take Ahri by the chin. The cool press of her fingertips sends another, less violent shiver down Ahri’s spine. Like this, Evelynn directs her gaze until she is facing the wall of the club, and the six-foot poster of their K/DA promo shot that’s plastered against it.

 

“Do you see that?” Evelynn asks, resting the point of her chin on Ahri’s shoulder. “ _ You _ did that.”

 

Evelynn’s presence against her is almost overwhelming— but Evelynn is good at that. She controls exactly how much of herself that she wishes to reveal, and it is so rarely more than a scant slip (like the ghost of an intent, or the promise of a touch), much less than she would have you believe, much less than you’d think her capable of.

 

With Ahri, she is a solid presence – a weight and warmth – against the left side of her body, drawing her in. Giving her it all.

 

Ahri recognises the want to sink into Evelynn, but isn’t sure which one of them it’s coming from.

 

“All of this,” Evelynn continues, her hand snaking up Ahri’s back, the trace of fake nails against the exposed skin of her neck, playing with her hair, “is your doing. We’re here because of you, Ahri, because of your vision. You know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in what you were doing— or that you could  _ do this _ .”

 

“I know,” Ahri agrees.

 

Evelynn is a good friend, an old friend, and also brutally frank.

 

It’s exactly why Ahri adores her.

 

“So, what are we doing out here, when they’re playing our music  _ in there _ ?” Evelynn pushes off from her shoulder, turning Ahri to face her in the process. She holds her at arms’ length, like she might shake her. She is all confidence and power behind the rims of her slanted glasses, and Ahri lets it fill her up.

 

Still, her stomach twists, and doubt comes quick and easy.

 

Evelynn’s demeanor changes instantly.

 

“Do you want me to take you home?” she asks, and Ahri knows she’d get no flack for saying yes.

 

She considers it, even, because as much as she doesn’t want to run from her past, from the fight that she  _ won _ , damnit, she also doesn’t particularly want to face it right now, like this, right here, either. She draws on her bottom lip and frowns and shakes her head, and if there’s one thing that can be said for Evelynn, it’s that her attitude is contagious.

 

Ahri breathes in the confidence that she exudes, and lets it bolster her own.

 

“I don’t want to go home,” she says, truthfully enough that Evelynn’s concern relaxes. It’s like a muscle that she doesn’t often get to exercise. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? You’d think I was still a kid, fretting like this. The thing is, I was in the middle of a conversation, and then a strobe light landed on someone at the wrong angle and they caught my eye, and it was him.

 

“Seeing Suh tonight took me right back there. It felt like nothing had changed. I had a drink in my hand, and I just thought,  _ god _ , I have to get rid of this. I can’t be seen drinking— what if I’m photographed?”

 

“It’s not that ridiculous,” Evelynn says, otherwise quietly taking Ahri in.

 

“I feel it.” Ahri sighs and wets her lips, and instantly regrets it for how they sting with the cold. She makes a mental note to reapply her lipgloss. “I still feel stifled by them— everybody around me was so certain of the person that I had to be, but that image wasn’t real. I was expected to be a caricature of myself every time I was outside of my home.”

 

“That’s the problem with an industry like this,” Evelynn sighs. “They’ll wear you down until you’re all skin and bone, and at the heart of each and every one of them is a vulture, waiting to pick up the scraps. Had they any talent themselves, they wouldn’t need to leech it from budding artists, and yet—”

 

She dusts an unseen bit of lint from her sleeve, dismissive.

 

“The industry is full of sycophants and tyrants, darling, but that’s why we’re doing this.”

 

Evelynn lowers her head enough for Ahri to catch the wink from behind her glasses.

 

It makes her feel  _ warm _ .

 

“And, we are doing this, aren’t we?”

 

“What’s that?” Ahri asks with a smile, indulging her, and Evelynn steps forward, linking their arms.

 

“Turning it upside down, of course. Causing some  _ gorgeous _ chaos. Winning, Ahri, on our own terms, with our own music, and our own messages.”

 

Ahri smiles at her fondly. “You’re drunk.”

 

“You’d know about it, if I were.”

 

The promise in her growl sends a thrill up Ahri’s spine, and like that, the lingering atmosphere that had followed her outside from the club dissipates back into the night air. Ahri breathes like it had been tight around her ribcage before it left. She is about to suggest that they return indoors, when she catches the angle at which Evelynn is looking at her, and it gives her pause.

 

“As for Suh,” Evelynn says, pursing her lips. “Want me to eat him?”

 

She’s only half-joking, and it draws a wobbly smile to Ahri’s lips.

 

Evelynn draws the glasses further down her nose with too-long nails, and  _ oh _ , perhaps she’s not joking at all.

 

“Not tonight,” Ahri says, sending her a look ( _ behave _ – as if Evelynn would ever). “No, let’s go back in there and celebrate like we should be doing. Let our success be punishment enough.”

 

Evelynn sighs dramatically, although the disappointment is real, and Ahri knows it.

 

“As you wish,” she says, running a hand along Ahri’s arm and then twining their fingers together. She makes toward the back exit of club and draws Ahri along with her. “Although, I have other suggestions, if it’s an  _ image _ problem we’re rebelling against.”

 

“We’re not rebelling,” Ahri tries to say, but the argument falls short when Evelynn is suddenly directly in front of her, chest-to-chest, and murmuring into her ear—

 

“Let’s cause a scandal, Ahri. Show them that they have no control over you anymore.”

 

Just before she draws back, Ahri feels the tip of her tongue tease against the lobe of her ear, and gasps. She is sure that she’s flushed pink and dazed, and yet cannot help it, as Evelynn draws away with a grin that says she was,  _ perhaps _ , half-joking.

 

She tugs on Ahri’s hand until Ahri all but stumbles into her, but Evelynn cushions her fall against her body.

 

The impact disrupts the glasses on her face, which fall down to the tip of her nose, revealing eyes bright with excitement and something deeper, something that Ahri recognises like a fire that’s already touching her skin.

 

_ Oh _ — perhaps, she’s not joking at all.


End file.
